ABC News speaks with a young hacker about what experts call a wide-ranging menace: a new generation of tech-savvy teens who are uniquely dangerous and surprisingly young.
A couple of things. I don’t know if you read the article but this is an adult male. I know that it says teenager, but it says that because he was 19 years old when he perpetrated his crime.
The second thing is that just because I agree that he knowingly broke the law in a way that could result in dire consequences for children, doesn’t mean I agree to ruining his life in return but I am pointing out how we got here, which is that he broke the law and showed himself to pose a threat to children.
That threat isn’t just about the threat to them financially in the event that someone were to steal their identity. This man threatened to release information on millions of children that could put them at risk to child predators including things like home addresses, family information, and medical information.
He knew that was wrong and he did it anyway. I’m sure rehabilitation is possible and I wish it were mandatory. The prison system in this country is fucked. But the system being messed up doesn’t absolve him of the harm he threatened.
The alternative for someone who is addicted is to remove all technology from their homes and work places, throw an ankle monitor on them and force things like mandatory drug tests and check ins.
The point of the US prison system isn’t to rehabilitate anyone, and the ankle monitor situation (house arrest) also doesn’t really rehabilitate anyone. It also doesn’t prevent him from doing further crimes and given that he claims to have an addiction to hacking and the fact that he himself says he should probably go to prison for what he did, I don’t know what the a exact alternative is.
in his particular case, he is 19. how long ago did he commit the “crime”? and they talk about multiple other kids being charged. the whole thing is fucked.
I am a different person from the one you were bantering with. This is the best quote I’ve found:
By the fall of 2024, Lane found the source of his next fix: Credentials stolen from a PowerSchool contractor were available online.
And he’s 20 now, mentioned right at the beginning of the article. So roughly 1.5 years ago? So if my math is right, he could have been 18? We have to count a few months more than just one year back (apr 2025 would have been exactly one year ago).
Anyway I upvoted the both of you for the conversation. No hard feelings at all. It’s just not so obvious to me he was 19 at the comission of the crime.
He is 20 years old now and the crime he was prosecuted for and convicted of was committed when he was 19 according to the first two paragraphs of the article that is linked.
On a recent Tuesday morning, as his parents were driving him to the federal prison in Connecticut where he’ll be locked up for the foreseeable future, 20-year-old Matthew Lane sent a text message to ABC News.
“It’s extremely sad, and I’m just scared,” he wrote.
Barely a year earlier, while still a teenager, he helped launch what’s been described as the biggest cyberattack in U.S. education history – a data breach that concerned authorities so much, it prompted briefings with senior government officials inside the White House Situation Room.
People seem to think that I’m advocating for him to suffer the messed up prison system when what I’m actually pointing out is that this is something he knowingly engaged in as a legal adult.
well he isn’t done with his brain deployment even now, and his incarceration wouldn’t fix anything. being legally an adult doesn’t change the ethics here.
Just because someone you view as a child did something terrible but you feel like they deserve a pass because the consequences of that terrible thing they did are too harsh doesn’t mean that this isn’t the reality and additionally doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask the question of whether they would have stopped if they hadn’t been caught or punished.
If a child was kidnapped or raped because of what he did, what then? where’s the line? Do you feel the same about school shooters, or children who molest other children, or is it just because he made a credible threat but wasn’t able to execute it that you feel he specifically deserves a pass here?
Brock Turner was 19 when he raped a woman who had passed out. He was heavily intoxicated. Should we take the fact that his brain wasn’t finished developing, or the fact that he was intoxicated into account when we decided if he broke the law?
Genuinely asking because there so much danger posed by leaking the data he stole, and pretending he did nothing wrong doesn’t really make sense to me.
I have already stated my views on prison and they hold for most crimes, regardless of age actually. I believe in rehabilitation rather than punishment, and I don’t think prison or the prison system offers that so I don’t believe prison is the place for this individual. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize what he did was wrong or had a great potential for wide spread harm.
Between August and December 2024, Lane used stolen login credentials to access the computer network of a second victim company – a software and cloud storage company that served school systems in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Lane caused personally identifying information of students and teachers stored on that company’s networks to be transferred to a computer server Lane leased in Ukraine. Later, the second victim company and others received threats that the names, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information, residential addresses, parent and guardian information, and passwords, among other data, of more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers would be “leak[ed] . . . worldwide” if the company did not pay a ransom of approximately $2.85 million in Bitcoin.
He was successful. The company paid the ransom. The fact that he was 18 instead of say 25 doesn’t enter into what the FBI charged him with because the law doesn’t care what age you are, and unfortunately, especially at the federal level it has no real way to mete out consequences to “fit the crime”.
You offer no solutions, don’t even have the beginnings of a way to better handle the situation (even though I can think of several that all have problems of their own including the house arrest suggestion I first posited) and this guy freely admits that he was unlikely to have stopped if he weren’t arrested.
Additionally, some of that data was leaked, leading to the company offering credit monitoring for 2 years but clearly we know that that leaked data will impact the victims possibly for the rest of their lives.
It turned out that – despite earlier assurances to the contrary – what one state official described as a “rogue actor” tied to the original breach secretly kept some of the data.
In exchange he got 4 years in prison which is a slap on the wrist when compared to what he might have gotten as far as prison time is concerned.
Let me ask you something. Would you have them let him go? No repercussions? No consequences?
A couple of things. I don’t know if you read the article but this is an adult male. I know that it says teenager, but it says that because he was 19 years old when he perpetrated his crime.
The second thing is that just because I agree that he knowingly broke the law in a way that could result in dire consequences for children, doesn’t mean I agree to ruining his life in return but I am pointing out how we got here, which is that he broke the law and showed himself to pose a threat to children.
That threat isn’t just about the threat to them financially in the event that someone were to steal their identity. This man threatened to release information on millions of children that could put them at risk to child predators including things like home addresses, family information, and medical information.
He knew that was wrong and he did it anyway. I’m sure rehabilitation is possible and I wish it were mandatory. The prison system in this country is fucked. But the system being messed up doesn’t absolve him of the harm he threatened.
The alternative for someone who is addicted is to remove all technology from their homes and work places, throw an ankle monitor on them and force things like mandatory drug tests and check ins.
The point of the US prison system isn’t to rehabilitate anyone, and the ankle monitor situation (house arrest) also doesn’t really rehabilitate anyone. It also doesn’t prevent him from doing further crimes and given that he claims to have an addiction to hacking and the fact that he himself says he should probably go to prison for what he did, I don’t know what the a exact alternative is.
in his particular case, he is 19. how long ago did he commit the “crime”? and they talk about multiple other kids being charged. the whole thing is fucked.
Would you like me to post exerpts from the article or are you actually going to read it?
I am a different person from the one you were bantering with. This is the best quote I’ve found:
And he’s 20 now, mentioned right at the beginning of the article. So roughly 1.5 years ago? So if my math is right, he could have been 18? We have to count a few months more than just one year back (apr 2025 would have been exactly one year ago).
Anyway I upvoted the both of you for the conversation. No hard feelings at all. It’s just not so obvious to me he was 19 at the comission of the crime.
Fair. Thank you for pointing that out.
I seem to recall skimming it pretty good 12 hours ago, then I went to work
He is 20 years old now and the crime he was prosecuted for and convicted of was committed when he was 19 according to the first two paragraphs of the article that is linked.
People seem to think that I’m advocating for him to suffer the messed up prison system when what I’m actually pointing out is that this is something he knowingly engaged in as a legal adult.
well he isn’t done with his brain deployment even now, and his incarceration wouldn’t fix anything. being legally an adult doesn’t change the ethics here.
Sigh. I have not been disputing this.
Just because someone you view as a child did something terrible but you feel like they deserve a pass because the consequences of that terrible thing they did are too harsh doesn’t mean that this isn’t the reality and additionally doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask the question of whether they would have stopped if they hadn’t been caught or punished.
If a child was kidnapped or raped because of what he did, what then? where’s the line? Do you feel the same about school shooters, or children who molest other children, or is it just because he made a credible threat but wasn’t able to execute it that you feel he specifically deserves a pass here?
Brock Turner was 19 when he raped a woman who had passed out. He was heavily intoxicated. Should we take the fact that his brain wasn’t finished developing, or the fact that he was intoxicated into account when we decided if he broke the law?
Genuinely asking because there so much danger posed by leaking the data he stole, and pretending he did nothing wrong doesn’t really make sense to me.
I have already stated my views on prison and they hold for most crimes, regardless of age actually. I believe in rehabilitation rather than punishment, and I don’t think prison or the prison system offers that so I don’t believe prison is the place for this individual. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize what he did was wrong or had a great potential for wide spread harm.
so what the feds are doing is wrong. whatever the solution is, it is not what they are doing
He was successful. The company paid the ransom. The fact that he was 18 instead of say 25 doesn’t enter into what the FBI charged him with because the law doesn’t care what age you are, and unfortunately, especially at the federal level it has no real way to mete out consequences to “fit the crime”.
You offer no solutions, don’t even have the beginnings of a way to better handle the situation (even though I can think of several that all have problems of their own including the house arrest suggestion I first posited) and this guy freely admits that he was unlikely to have stopped if he weren’t arrested.
Additionally, some of that data was leaked, leading to the company offering credit monitoring for 2 years but clearly we know that that leaked data will impact the victims possibly for the rest of their lives.
In exchange he got 4 years in prison which is a slap on the wrist when compared to what he might have gotten as far as prison time is concerned.
Let me ask you something. Would you have them let him go? No repercussions? No consequences?